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After class on Thursday, PGrobs and I go into a discussion on the nature of academia, whether professors were generally more or less non-narrative than the rest of the population. This question has been nibbling at my brain for the past few days, and I think I've found an interesting tie-in from On Beauty.

One of the reasons that Howard's art criticism is so subversive is because he attempts to divorce Rembrandt from the romance. He basically argues that a painting is simply a painting - a careful representation of something, and that there's no story, either of the painter's motives or of the figures depicted, framing the painting itself (there was an explicit comment to this effect somewhere, but I've had trouble locating it). I think that this is why he is so intrigued by Vee's comment that the paintings that shy, quiet Katie admired are debased, just "a painting about painting," (253). For Howard, the a painting is self-contained and must be considered as such, critically. In other words, Howard is rebelling against a tradition of viewing art as a story, insisting rather that art is non-narrative.

And he's not published for it! Some students' interest may be piqued, he may get a lot of attention, but it's because he's proposing a subversive means of viewing art. Darwin, too, challenged the way we think about science, arguing that science is narrative, an ever-changing flux, rather than a fixed scala natura. Just as Darwin made non-narrative science a story, Howard reduces narrative art, romantic genius, into a set of fixed, predictable, and replicatable circumstances. What I'm seeing, then, is that Belsey attempts to do to art what Darwin did to science - inverting the narrativity.

Thoughts?

Katie Baratz